Al Jazeera opens a can of worms
The spectre of spot-fixing has reappeared in cricket through an Al Jazeera documentary, streaming on their website since yesterday, that alleges widespread spot-fixing in Test cricket and specifically names two Test matches that had fixed passages.
The documentary is the culmination of 18 months of undercover investigation by Al Jazeera and the meat of the findings were gleaned from communication, through an underworld intermediary, with Indian crime syndicate member Aneel Munawar.
In an article titled 'Al Jazeera exposes the match-fixer of Mumbai,' it is said that the International Cricket Council has taken the documentary very seriously and launched an investigation into the matter.
The two Test matches in question are the India-England Test in Chennai in December 2016 and the India-Australia Test in Ranchi in March of the following year.
Both Australia and England boards have stood behind their players. Cricket Australia has asked Al Jazeera for raw and unedited footage of the documentary.
The meetings with Munawar were secretly recorded. “I'm telling you, each script I give you will happen, happen and happen,” Al Jazeera quoted Munawar as saying about the two matches, before revealing that 'both the spot-fixes he gave us went down exactly as he had said they would'.
The report also added that Indian intelligence sources confirmed that Munawar works for a criminal mafia company called D-Company, a syndicate that controls most of India's 60-billion-dollar-a-year illegal betting market.
Munawar revealed the names of the players in the England and Australia teams that he said were involved in the fix, but Al Jazeera has not disclosed the players' names. The report also said that there is no evidence that any other players of either team had knowledge of the fix.
The named England players categorically denied the allegation through their lawyers and said that for “the batting team to 'fix' scores to within such degree of precision as alleged is highly improbable, if not practically impossible”.
Munawar claimed that 60-70 per cent of international matches could be fixed and that his company paid around a million dollars to bribe players in the world's top Test teams, often through a middleman or cricket official. The report also has him saying that the company bribed players in every national team and fixed mostly international matches, but that domestic Twenty20 tournaments are also fertile ground.
He also professed to being unconcerned by the anti-corruption setups, saying that the “company has connections and they manage these things, these type of problems”.
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